Someone going by jahting has an interesting little write-up about Amazon's Mechanical Turk. He points to this article (AI Gets a Brain) in ACM Queue magazine by Jeff Barr and Luis Felipe Cabrera. The article is four pages (on the web, fwiw) and has a lot of basic info, but it's a good overview of mTurk.

Jahting wrote:

With the Mechanical Turk Amazon has created the quintessential Web Service. This service is not implemented in J2EE, .NET or Ruby on Rails but by human brain power (language: „Nature 0.4b“, plattform: „Human Brain“ ).

Heh. Indeed.

Elsewhere on the web, Barr and Cabrera wrote:

Checks and Balances

Integral to the success of the Mechanical Turk concept is a set of checks and balances that protect the system from intentional or accidental misuse by workers or requesters. A principal defensive tactic is the use of statistical measures. Statistics are kept per worker for such values as:

• Total number of HITs attempted
• Total number of HITs completed
• Total number of HITs accepted by the requesters
• Total number of HITs abandoned

Additional statistics are tracked for each type of HIT processed by each worker. Similar statistics are kept for requesters, although they are not currently made available for external use.

Go check them both out and come back here to talk about it. ;)

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